Where’s the Buzz: Google Maps India With MapMaker

August 28th, 2008 by Apurba Sen

Filed under behavior, crowdsourcing, google, Google Trends, India, internet behavior, maps, search volume, tagging, where's the buzz

End June – Google released Map Maker where users can edit the specifics of their country into the Google maps. Yesterday the service was made available to the nation where it was conceived and developed , India . With this the new Map Maker is now available in 58 countries in Asia, the Island Nations, and the Caribbean.

“Google Map Maker solves an inherent need especially for countries such as ours where maps data is sparse. This product embodies our passion to empower people everywhere, to share knowledge of the places they know best by creating maps.” says Lalitesh Katragadda, Creator of Google Map Maker.

Google Trends shows the healthy interest on ‘maps’ query on the Indian subcontinent. In past, when Wikimapia reached 1 Million places in just three months after its launch, 14 of its top 20 most annotated places were in India. However a closer look on the annotations per city area & per pincode zones showed not all part of India had contributed equally to wikimapia’s ‘crowdsourcing’ approach.

For example : Bombay , Madras & Calcutta led the activities in terms of annotations/area (sq km) & annotations/pincode zones whereas most of India including a major part of the national capital Delhi remained untagged.

Will the things be very different this time with Google Mapmaker ?

Tweet This Post Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post